Mark Jacobs' Recommended Reading

Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men : A Story of the Near and Far Future
One of the most succinct and accurate renderings of mankind's present state of mind and future
progression. It documents the future of man from the start of WW2 and continues until the Sun
engulfs the earth, and beyond. Considering this book was first published in 1931, it is
remarkable, both in its honesty as regards human nature, and in its phenomenal span. By the
time we reach chapter 3 of the 16 in this book, it is already 2300 AD and you feel like you
have had the viewpoint of a God. So intense is the writing, that a few pages can take you hours
to read and weeks to think about. What a writer, what a visionary. Of particular interest to
me was the laconic way he can sum up an entire country's culture and people, and the accuracy
of prediction in the first part of the book. Quotes from around what would be the back-end of
the 20th century on his timescale (what he terms "Balkan Europe") :-

"... For love of France was the undoing of the French. They prized the truly
admirable spirit of France so extravagantly, that they regarded all other nations as barbarians."

"... the practice of communism was gradually undermined. For the Russian state came increasingly
under the influence of Western, and especially American, finance. The materialism of the official creed
also became a farce, for it was foreign to the Russian mind. Thus between practice and theory
there was, in both respects, a profound inconsistency. What was once a vital and promising
culture became insincere."

Points to note :-

All budding politicians should be forced to read this book. It should be part of any
politics curriculum.

Strikingly accurate and plausible portent of homo sapiens future. Read in the context of 2002,
it is easy to see mankind's current folly and the extrapolation of current scientific endeavours. For
example, we may achieve global peace ("An Americanised Planet"") for a few millennia, but at the
cost of spiritual and intellectual freedom and development. When the "Fall of the First Men"
happened, recovery took a very long time :-

"Later, when the epidemic was spent, even though civilisation was already in ruins,
a concerted effort of devotion might yet have rebuilt it on a more modest plan. But among the
First Men, only a minority had ever been capable of wholehearted devotion. The great majority
were by nature too much obsessed by private impulses."

Sounds like the malaise of current homo sapiens.

The theme of continual physical exertion and constant movement of attention as an underpinning
for the lifestyles of all successful social inhabitants was beautifully described. This is so true
of today's and future societies. No pause for reflection or contemplation. The abandonment of
philosophy as a science in the future. The pig-headed clinging to pagan artefact or idol worship,
rather than logic.

The brilliant description of the "Second Men", with his finer array of senses, and his natural
propensity for altruism.

The plausible evolution of intelligent life on Mars in 10 million years time, with the
subsequent misunderstanding of what is intelligent between Earth and Mars.

Man's creation of more evolved forms of man meshes brilliantly with current genetic research.

Apply common sense to the situation as it is now, to work out the best course of action.
Never invoke traditions or old beliefs as these threaten your survival in an ever-changing
environment.

Within the same species, organisms are equally complex biochemically. Therefore, any social
structure that imposes arbitrary division within the species, is intrinsically flawed. This is true
of current homo sapiens organisation, where certain people are far more highly regarded than others
for stupid reasons, and divisions between cliques of people usually erupt in violence, rather than
heated debate.

Just because someone cannot be convinced of your way of seeing things, doesn't mean
that physical coercion becomes necessary.

"Live and let live" doesn't mean live it up and let the rest live
in squalor.

Nothing should be regarded as taboo, save that which is unnatural.

There are absolutely no restrictions on what anyone can think.

If you can have it, then anyone can have it.

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
After reading "Last and First Men", I approached Olaf's next masterpiece, "Star Maker" (
first published in 1937), with some disbelief as to how on earth he could possibly better
the span, pathos and magnanimity he had already laid out. A quick scan of the appendices
yielded the impression that this book would embrace not just the tiny fragment of history that
was mankind's stay in the universe, but that all history of the universe would be described,
and that of other universes too. All of this in less pages than "Last and First Men"! My
immediate reaction was simply, "No way, Jose" and I wondered how he was going to set about such
an immense task. The vehicle used was, of course, the best man has going for him - his
imagination. A contemplative man is whisked off on an imaginary journey through space and time
by an ever-gathering mass consciousness. He describes how galaxies of stars formed from
nebulae that were born flying apart from each other, how these cooling nebulae condensed into
galaxies of stars, and how the rare occurrences of young stars that passed each other, formed
planets, and how, on a few rare planets, intelligent life evolved. He shows how certain
conditions inhibit the appearance of life, or intelligent life, and how certain evolutionary
pathways cause life to stagnate or wipe itself out. He puts mankind's existence into
perspective in both universal time and space.

There are touching moments and there are exciting battles. There is both tragedy and comedy.
There are uplifting victories and crushing defeats. Far from being stuffy, this book is really
a very good read indeed, considering the scope of its subject. The final few short chapters
really have you reading a couple of paragraphs, and then putting the book down to have a long
ponder over what has just been addressed. And the book's climax leaves you with lifelong
matters to mull over - one of these being, "Boy, and I thought I was pretty intelligent..."

Here are a couple of lengthy quotes for your enjoyment :-

... The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally more or less as follows.
The starting point, it will be remembered, was a plight like that in which our own Earth now
stands. The dialectic of the world's history had confronted the race with a problem with which
the traditional mentality could never cope. The world-situation had grown too complex for
lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of individual integrity in leaders and in led,
such as was as yet possible only to a few minds. Consciousness had already been violently
awakened out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism, of poignant
but pitifully restricted self-awareness. And individualism, together with the traditional
tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the world. Only after a long-drawn agony of economic
distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world, could
the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not achieved. "Human nature", or
its equivalent in the many worlds, could not change itself; and the environment could not
remake it.

But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a miracle. Or, if the
reader prefers, the environment miraculously refashioned the spirit. There occurred a
widespread and almost sudden waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of
will. To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not have been
scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible knowledge of "human nature" as
manifested in the earlier age. To later generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as
a belated wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity.

and from later in the book :-

... The result of this extraordinary custom, of artificial fatherhood by "brute-men", which was
carried on without remission in all countries for a generation, and in a less thorough manner
for a very much longer period, was to alter the composition of the whole quasi-human race. In
order to maintain continued adaptability to an ever-changing environment a race must at all
costs preserve in itself its slight but potent salting of sensibility and originality. In this
world the precious factor now became so diluted as to be ineffective. Henceforth the
desperately complex problems of the world were consistently bungled. Civilization decayed. The
race entered on a phase of what might be called pseudo-civilized barbarism, which was in
essence sub-human and incapable of change. This state of affairs continued for some millions of
years, but at last the race was destroyed by the ravages of a small rat-like animal against
which it could devise no protection.

I must not stay to notice the strange fortunes of all the many other quasi-human worlds. I will
mention only that in some, though civilization was destroyed in a succession of savage wars,
the germ of recovery precariously survived. In one, the agonizing balance of the old and the
new seemed to prolong itself indefinitely. In another, where science had advanced too far for
the safety of an immature species, man accidentally blew up his planet and his race. In
several, the dialectical process of history was broken short by invasion and conquest on the
part of inhabitants of another planet. These and other disasters, to be described in due
course, decimated the galactic population of worlds.

In conclusion I will mention that in one or two of these quasi-human worlds a new and superior
biological race emerged naturally during the typical world crisis, gained power by sheer
intelligence and sympathy, took charge of the planet, persuaded the aborigines to cease
breeding, peopled the whole planet with its own superior type, and created a human race which
attained communal mentality, and rapidly advanced beyond the limits of our exploring and over-
strained understanding. Before our contact failed, we were surprised to observe that, as the
new species superseded the old and took over the vast political and economic activity of that
world, it came to realize with laughter the futility of all this feverish and aimless living.
Under our eyes the old order began to give place to a new and simpler order, in which the world
was to be peopled by a small "aristocratic" population served by machines, freed alike from
drudgery and luxury and intent on exploration of the cosmos and the mind.

This change-over to a simpler life happened in several other worlds not by the intervention of
a new species, but simply by the victory of the new mentality in its battle against the old.

To summarise, "Star Maker" is the best book in the whole world ever, and everybody should be
forced to read it and understand it, at gunpoint.

Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell - The Hero with a Thousand Faces
A thoroughly intense and all-embracing read. In the 2-page preface written in 1948, he states such
ground-shakingly obvious facts about the human psyche, that you'll wonder why these ideas had
never dawned on you before. Then, into the main text of the book, and you're spirited away into an
adventure that explores all forms of mythology and their importance in founding
different cultures all around the world. But it goes much further than simply reciting tales from the past.
The narrative (thoroughly annotated with references to other works) is so reassuring and
worldly-wise, that the book is almost impossible to put down. Yet, this author seems to be humble
and meek, despite the cavalcade of knowledge and calmly-considered conclusions. At one point, he
claims that Buddhism and Hinduism are the best religions because they do not preach that a
single figurehead is the goal of your worship, but that these religions simply suggest pathways to
enlightenment. Compare Islam, Judaism and Christianity, where a single God is the end to all means.
The latter religions are also represented by the most warlike countries! Both authorative and
speculative, this book is the work of a genius. This man really understood how the human mind
works. First published 1949.

Rupert Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake - Greening of the Rebirth of Nature Science and God
Rupert presents a balanced and logical presentation of how scientific thought began, describing
its progress from the dawn of civilisations through the Renaissance, to modern-day empirical
platitudes. He shows that both sides are manifestly wrong in their attempts at explaining what
is truly observed in terms of behaviour and function. He concurrently presents an alternative
argument based on morphic fields and the fact that everything any living thing does is
recorded into these fields forever, to be called on whenever a resonance with a living member
of that species occurs with these fields. For example, DNA does not explain why, amid the same
protein building blocks, and DNA pattern in each cell, an embryo's arm grows differently to
its leg. Morphic fields, however, remember how the blocks go together and exert an influence to
survival-successful ends.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It is superb and really eye-opening. For example, the
parallelism between marsupial and placental mammals, shows how the same design, but with slight
variations, can come about through universal morphic fields. It also leaves room for
speculation as to how the morphic fields caused by this planet, match those on other life-
supporting planets in the universe, and hence, how similar aliens might be to us. A really
wonderful read, and one of my top books ever.

The only slur I could truthfully level at it would be the tendency to drift off into religious
connotations as a way of explaining the spirituality of a place. I think energy fields cluster
around different bits of nature differently, and they resonate with us in unconsciously
noticeable ways differently. Sometimes the resonance affects a whole species in such a way that
a place can become important because of its "nice vibe", but it is actually the underlying
contours of that bit of nature, that are making the human form happy, not some "godly spirit".

Craig Hagstrom

Craig Hagstrom - The Passionate Ape
A milestone book - it traces the roots of mankind on this planet through plausible conjecture
based on experience and evidence. It has a lot of parallels with Elaine Morgan's work on the
Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, but journeys more into the psychological ramifications of a
semi-aquatic existence, rather than sticking to plain physiology. One of the most wonderful
revelations in this tome, comes towards the end of the book, where Craig talks about the size
of our brain as compared with a chimp's, and how the difference is largely down to the fatty
nature of our brain cells. Chimp's brain cells are more densely packed than ours. There was an
evolutionary trade-off between the size of our heads, the diameter of the stretched womb
opening for childbirth, and the buoyancy of our heads when we slept in the sea. I have yet to
see the report of this fascinating fact elsewhere and it may be due to the consequences of
accepting that we aren't that much more intelligent than other ape species anyway. We just have
fat brains that float in water better!

There are many such revelations in this book - some easier to accept than others. Neoteny and
how it affected human development psychologically, is thoroughly discussed and I learnt an
awful lot from this section. Sections on how, when we were in the water, males had to woo
females differently, since physical prowess is much more difficult to prove when up to your
necks in water and it is difficult to move quickly. Males evolved singing and poetry as
intellectual tools for charming the female into mating. Male intelligence grew as a result. We
came back onto land, and wooing resorted to physical shows of aggression and dominance. Males
became less intelligent than the females they were "chatting up". And, hey presto, modern
society!

While in water, the face plays the most important visual stimulus for pair bonding, and
hence our fascination with appearance.

This is such a revelatory book, one is bound to read it repeatedly over one's life. It gives
such a perspective on humankind that it empowers the reader with insights that no other book on
human development has done in the past. There was even a dedicated website for this book and
discussions about it on a forum at
http://www.passionateape.com - but, alas it is no
longer there. Here is a lengthy quote from the tail end of the book for a tantalising taste of
its pithy and rewarding nature :-

Foreign Femininity

Women's sexuality similarly carries no moral message. Not a superior emotional bond, passions
are hyper-evolved descendants of personal preference and fear, grown by default when other
rewards quit working for us. Passion, first evolved in women, is an addiction useful to the
species where free choice led to celibacy.

Passion helps because women cannot have what they want. If their ideal man actually existed,
they could pick him coolly as buying vegetables in a store. Instead women must choose from the
men at hand, all flawed by cumulative effects of prior women's choices. Like any other hunger,
passion clears the shelves regardless of the quality of the goods.

We could avoid much turmoil by genuine and innate monogamy. If after mating we stayed together
for life, male wandering would not occur and male dullness would have no value. Courting, not
staying home, would have retained evolutionary emphasis and we would still be a nation of
poets and singers. But promiscuity flows deep in our genes, dull men angered women less, and
here we are.

To lure men, women gave our species sexual signals that remain always the same. Part of their
uniformity comes from men's inability to detect ovulation, part from women suppressing cycles.
The whole belongs to our species, not to either sex. Though women are unconscious of these
signals and may disavow any intent to send them, females cannot escape evoking male courting.
Ancient primate promiscuity affects the most chaste of women and how they dress, though they
deny it or don't know it.

But real promiscuity died, and the hairy picnickers are long gone. Some men and women are
wildly promiscuous by human standards, though tame compared to, say, a macaque, who may couple
with four different partners in an hour. The average human cannot tolerate much sex without
love, and this resistance first evolved in women.

Women, far more than men, struggle with conflicting sexual pulls. For over 70 million years
women's ancestors sought dominance in males, and for eight million years that dominance has
evolved into a delicious terror. Yet for their first sex women tend to choose nice boys who
feel safe to be with, like the men they want eventually to marry. Women like dangerous men who
are safely beyond reach, and safe partners who are not quite controllable.

Men have changed much less than women during the last few million years. Men inherit from their
mothers the ability to love, but can enjoy sex without affection much more readily than women
can. Women have undergone a revolution of body and soul that continually leaves men baffled.
Men still dream of the lusty females their ancestors knew, insatiable and accessible. In erotic
films and in men's minds she appears again, as an old man half-remembers a youthful tryst. It
is not men's fault that they dream of her; it is not women's fault that she died. She vanished
when sex grew awkward, leaving her hesitant younger sister for men to cope with.

Battles Continue

Colliding needs of men and women still shape us. Not ancient history, men's girl-child
caricature is growing today. Men probe for sexual access through a wall of female doubts.
Women's passion conjures male alpha-ness and intimacy where it might not exist. Emotion's
impact still builds a deep structure at our points of contact, and the deep structure protects
us.

Our existence makes sense only if we hold an asset we haven't yet allowed for. Knowing we have
little intellectual edge over other apes, finding no real value in slow growth, we cannot
explain our success in the face of our cousins' slow extinction. But we accidentally forged a
gem in the deep structure, and it explains why we thrive while our relatives dwindle.

Old Quotes of the Month

Quote for July 2003 from Canada's former Privacy Commissioner
George Radwanski :-

Our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating
police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to
biometric face-recognition technologies that will match our on-screen images to file photos
-- from such sources as drivers' licences, passports or ID cards -- and enable the police to
identify us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets.

an idea Charles Stross had speculated on in a sci-fi story called
Antibodies.
Quote for August 2003 from AIDS campaigner Boyd Graves :-

Now comes plaintiff, Boyd Ed Graves, pursuant to a conference call between the parties on
Monday, August 4, 2003, who seeks an additional extension of time (60 days) as agreed by the
parties. Plaintiff has encountered a second incidence of police misconduct relative to this
Court proceeding. See, EXHIBIT "E", herein. Plaintiff was institutionalized for making
"irrational statements that the government made HIV/AIDS. Id. Since appearing before this
federal Court on July 3, 2003, under color of law, plaintiff has been "fetched-up" twice,
beaten, injected, interrogated, dumped into a violently mentally ill facility, stripped naked
for ten hours, denied medical attention and dumped for five days in the general inmate
population. Plaintiff requests this extension of time in which to address the false criminal
charges against him. Plaintiff is also recovering from surgery to his dominant hand.

From birth we are bombarded with propaganda about the course our lives should take. Instead
of being taught about our spiritual nature in schools, we are taught that the ego (the lowest
chakra point) path of control, violence, sex, manipulation and power over others is the only
one there is and that only the strongest survive in the human jungle. We absorb this
propaganda from those around us (who also believe this to be true) and food / chemicals /
drink / polluted air we absorb which have an effect on our bodies (by polluting the
circulation) and by extension our brains (thus our THOUGHT PROCESSES - most important), eg
fluoride in water, toothpaste (used in tranquillizers, is a chemical waste product of the
steel industry and was used as rat poison), additives / preservatives in food. Instead of
being encouraged to raise our awareness through purity to its highest spiritual level in
order to access the inner senses of intuition, insight, wisdom, Universal Knowledge, etc we
are told that there is no truth other than that which is to be found at the lowest chakra
point (base of the spine), the sexual/anal centre; when attention is centred on this lowest
point of our nervous system the Truth which manifests (in speech, physical behaviour,etc.) is
one of hatred, violence, self-pity, jealousy, greed, selfishness and perceptions of false
power - i.e. ego. The inner senses (innocence) are the key to the door of inner consciousness
or universal knowledge, which ridicules the idea of linear/3rd dimensional living. These
inner senses tell us all we need to know about living in this conscious world and our true
purpose for being on this earth plane. Everyone is a free spirit in this inner world, free to
play any part he/she wishes, free from manipulation/control by others. No slave to money as
money serves its true single purpose as an interest-free means of exchange and not as a store
of value. This inner world is supposed to manifest in this world as our creative/higher self
- where we can act out our inner feelings and inclinations without harming anyone else. These
days it is only those with no financial demands (i.e. mortgage, family, etc.) who have
complete freedom to do with their lives whatever they wish.

You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a
prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came
in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control
techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and
what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to
carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you
wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any
reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors; he amasses a dossier
on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty
child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation.
Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and
in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed
immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? The demeaning
system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women
and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes
it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or, better still,
industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says
these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid,
monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much
better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant
moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives,
handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing
home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for
autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded
phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus
reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else.
Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and
expertise in everything. They're used to it.

By 1974, Stanford Research Institute had developed a computer system capable of reading a
person's mind by correlating the brain waves of subjects on an electroencephalograph with
specific commands. The concept of mind-reading computers is no longer science fiction. Neither
is their use by Big Brotherly governments. Major Edward Dames of Psi-Tech said in April 1995
on NBC's The Other Side program: "The US government has an electronic device which could
implant thoughts in people." Dames would not comment any further. The latest development in the
technology of induced fear and mind control is the cloning of the human EEG or brain waves of
any targeted victim, or indeed groups. With the use of powerful computers, segments of human
emotions which include anger, anxiety, sadness, fear, embarrassment, jealousy, resentment,
shame, and terror, have been identified and isolated within the EEG signals as `emotion
signature clusters.' Their relevant frequencies and amplitudes have been measured. Then the
very frequency/amplitude cluster is synthesized and stored on another computer. Each one of
these negative emotions is separately tagged. They are then placed on the Silent Sound carrier
frequencies and could silently trigger the occurrence of the same basic emotion in another
human being.

"Intelligence", of whatever order, is innovative. When there are repetitions of a pattern of
behaviour which limits decisions, as action is limited in a chess game, to only certain future
moves, as if only these pre-anticipated moves are possible, there may be "advanced
intelligence" involved with these strategies of limitation. But what is the intention of this
"advanced intelligence"? Possibly, the intent of a control-oriented intelligence might be to
interest individuals in the supposed superiority of certain analytical systems (the exegesis
games we play with raw observational data) in order to limit rather than expand the tactical
understanding of some political and/or social situation. As one example, an individual who
sincerely believes that either "god" or "sex" is behind all "real time" social manifestations
may fail to correctly anticipate the future behaviour of an epicene atheist. If "advanced
intelligence" can convince any individual to see all reality through a pre-determined
interpretive filter, then this intelligence has effectively controlled the decision-making
process of the individual who accepts this interpretive system.

Even in very small quantities, sodium fluoride is a deadly poison to which no effective
antidote has been found. Every exterminator knows that it is the most effective rat-killer.
Sodium Fluoride is entirely different from organic calcium-fluoro-phosphate needed by our
bodies and provided by nature, in God's great providence and love, to build and strengthen our
bones and our teeth. This organic calcium-fluoro-phosphate, derived from proper foods, is an
edible organic salt, insoluble in water and assimilable by the human body; whereas the non-
organic sodium fluoride used in fluoridating water is instant poison to the body and fully
water soluble. The body refuses to assimilate it. Careful, bonafide laboratory experimentation
by conscientious, patriotic research chemists, and actual medical experience, have both
revealed that instead of preserving or promoting 'dental health', fluoridated drinking water
destroys teeth before adulthood and after, by the destructive mottling and other pathological
conditions it actually causes in them, and also creates many other very grave pathological
conditions in the internal organisms of bodies consuming it. How then can it be called a
'health plan'? What's behind it?

Weeks refers particularly to an alteration of Maxwell's equations which resulted from Maxwell's
extensive research into electromagnetism--alterations which drastically affected the entire
course of "mainstream" science and physics forever afterward; notably in the information made
available to scientists and physicists off the time such as Einstein, as well as the subsequent
conceptual framework which Einstein arrived at. To cut to the chase, the missing link which
would provide the key to the unified field theory was deliberately cut out of Maxwell's
equations by a rather sinister group of scientists before Maxwell's work was presented to the
scientific community and the world. Of course his original work and all the implications
thereof were and are now known to the covert world government, as are the resultant advanced
sciences and applications of this knowledge to very high technology. This technology is all
being implemented in the furtherance of unquestionably evil, abusive, oppressive, brutal and
rapacious agendas and goals; with consequences which are destructive to nearly every
significant aspect of human beings, destructive to human societies and any of its positive,
hopeful and constructive goals, and destructive globally, to the fabric of life itself; in part
due to a general state of mind which has no understanding of, respect for, and connection with
and to nature and the earth with its multitude of life forms; a state of mind which is the
product of our current dehumanized, mechanistic and massively mind controlled (through every
available means) existence at the hands of the worldwide covert government and its super hi-
tech arsenal of mind manipulating technologies.

First man, as I knew him and his history, was a remarkably gentle being, fierce only in defence
of himself and the life of those in his keeping. He had no legends or stories of great wars
among his own kind and regarded the killing of another human being except in self-defence as
the ultimate depravity of his spirit. I was told a most moving story of how a skirmish between
two clans in which just one man was killed on a long forgotten day of dust and heat and
sulphur sun, caused them to renounce armed conflict forever. He was living proof to me of how
the pattern of the individual in service of a self that is the manifestation of the divine in
man was built into life at the beginning and will not leave him and the earth alone until it is
fulfilled. It is no mere intellectual or ideological concept, however much that, too, may be
needed, but a primary condition written into the contract of life with the creator.

Stephanie McMillan: No. The concept of god-which was invented as a way to explain natural
phenomena-is one of the most destructive forces in the world. Under capitalism, people are
presented with the non-choice of hedonism or religion. People who don't like the emptiness of
hedonism are encouraged to find meaning and purpose in god, instead of in realistically
addressing social problems. We're supposed to lie back and let god handle everything-how
disempowering. And how convenient to justify atrocities in the name of god's will.

More than 15,000,000 Americans are affected by asthma. Smoking cannabis (what the AMA called
"the raw drug") would be beneficial for 80% of them and add 30 to 60 million person-years in
the aggregate of extended life to current asthmatics over presently legal toxic medicines -
especially theophylline for children ... Fourteen percent of all blindness in America is from
glaucoma, a progressive loss of vision. Cannabis smoking would benefit 90% of our 2,500,000
glaucoma victims, and is 2 to 3 times as effective as any current medicines for reducing ocular
pressure. And, cannabis use has no toxic side effects to the liver and kidneys, nor is there
any danger of the occasional sudden death syndromes associated with the legal pharmaceutical
glaucoma drugs/drops. Most California eye doctors will discreetly advise their patients to use
"street" marijuana in addition to (or to mitigate) their toxic legal glaucoma medicines ...
Researchers at the Medical College of Virginia discovered that cannabis is an incredibly
successful herb for reducing many types of tumours, both benign and malignant (cancerous). The
DEA and other federal agencies had ordered these tumour studies done after hearing of
erroneous reports of possible immunicological problems associated with cannabis smoke. When,
instead of health problems, an apparent medical breakthrough occurred in 1975 and successful
tumour reductions were recorded, orders were handed down by the DEA and the National Institute
of Health to defund all further cannabis/tumour research and reporting.
[Cohen and Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976]

This society is obviously based on hierarchy, competition, inequality and suppression of
nature. There is domination, coercion, psychic (and physical) violence, fear and hate, almost
everywhere; in the kindergarten, schools, universities and workplaces. Because the main
economic principles are bossing and profit making, it is logical that the main principles of
social life are also bossing and profit making, in a different way. Violence really is around us.
I remember the situation in my school. As a little kid, I was always tense and anxious in the
halls, as were all other kids, because every moment somebody could attack me. There was
constant fighting, mocking, jealousy, hatred, in the free spaces, and constant fear in the
classrooms, where the teachers satisfy their sadism and destructiveness. I was always a witness
of violence, as I passed through the elementary school, high school, university and even my
working place. People are alienated, vicious, they hate life, they can' t understand
unconditional love and they hate sexuality. Most of children are bored and utterly unmotivated
for thinking, reading, inventing, loving. They are honest about this in the company of their
coevals. Many of them drink, smoke and take drugs from the early age.

I always felt negative emotions, I never suppressed anything, I hated authorities, teachers,
and their coercion. I believed that I was a different species, more advanced one, which has the
capacity for love, which has the natural instinct for learning and creativity, which is not
naturally agressive, but only reactive to violence, which does not need coercion to function,
but has self regulation. Later, of course, I replaced this theory, with humanism and
socialism.

Most people behave as they do because the system, which drives the adults to be violent,
feared, depressive, apathetic and ascetic, inflicts wounds on the newborn and young children, by
means of authoritarianism, neglect, religious practices (suppression of sex, circumscision).
As they grow up, they are constantly scared in disciplinarian institutions, forced into
competition which fills them with distrust and hate, taught to be conformists and servile, not
to think for themselves, to abandon their original feelings and thoughts, to be like everyone
else. Of course, not to break so many unwritten and written codes is impossible, so it
contributes to anxiety and guilt.

The authoritarian system meets the needs of neurotics, it enables them to satisfy their sadism,
servitude, hate, narcissism, greed, selfishness. I am convinced that these needs are escape
from anxiety, feelings of weakness, isolation and insignificance. I agree with Erich Fromm in
this sense. But I do not believe there is some existential, basic, inherent fear that drives
man, but that it is instilled in a child by the practise of parenting, schooling, and so on.
Fear naturally is a feeling of vulnerability and powerlessness or just stimulates those feelings
when it is unconscious. Sadism works because it suppresses that fear and creates a false emotion
of power. That is how the dummified, uncreative, servile authoritarian character is formed.
How could it be otherwise? The system needs such people. They maintain it, they are part of it.
It is self repeating. How could the capitalistic and state hierarchy function if the people
were not a mass, but developed personalities, empathic, loving, freedom-seeking, cooperative,
non violent, non greedy, non sadistic, not lazy and not obsessed with popularity and power? We
would then see equality, direct democracy, collective property, non coercive institutions. We
would do away with the money and competition. Solidarity would be a basic principle.

Physical reality is not the sum total of the universe and its contents. We are not merely bags
of chemicals, and nor is anything else, even inanimate objects. The fabric of the space-time
continuum is not as simple as our scientists think it is. It is benign, and is inclined
to spawn "life" within its fabric. The universe does not consist of separate parts. It is one
thing. Uni-verse. Everything in it is a manifestation of energy fluctuations flowing through
its contour-biased fabric. The energy flows change the contours, which, in turn, redirect the
energy flows. Free will is the key to consciousness (awareness). As soon as one accepts this
axiom about what the universe is, you see that conscious beings have the opportunity to
willingly redirect energy movement, and that the best at doing this get the lion's share of
whatever they need for their comfort and survival. This also means that other species are aware
(or conscious) in that they also take opportunities to redirect energy flows for the benefit
of their survival chances or pleasure-seeking activities. The more you "go with the flow", the
less evolved you are likely to be. The madness in today's world is that the species pompously
named "homo sapiens" does not take these opportunities very often, because everything is
riddled with social concern. The thought processes necessary to say "yay or nay" in any given
situation have become so intricate (thanks to mass media), that intuition goes largely unheard,
and bad decisions are often made. We frequently go against the "grain" of the space-time
continuum's fluctuating energy flows and contour mappings, by trying to use our memory of a
recent opportunity, instead of the actual window itself. Whatever we think we "know" may as
well be scrapped since it is out of synch with the reality we're part of. This instant
"scrapping" paradoxically brings enlightenment and understanding!

Given the right genes and hence the right proteins, and the right systems by which protein
synthesis is controlled, the organism is somehow supposed to assemble itself automatically.
This is rather like delivering the right materials to a building site at the right times and
expecting a house to grow spontaneously. Consider your arms and legs. They contain exactly the
same kinds of muscle cells, nerve cells, and so on. They contain the same proteins and other
chemicals; the bones are made of identical substance. Yet they have different shapes, just as
houses of different design can be made from the same building materials. The chemicals alone do
not determine the form. Nor does the DNA. The DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and
the legs, and indeed everywhere else in the body. All the cells are genetically programmed
identically. Yet somehow they behave differently and form tissues and organs of different
structures. Clearly some formative influence other than DNA must be shaping the developing arms
and legs. All developmental biologists acknowledge this fact. But at this stage their
mechanistic explanations peter out into vague statements about "complex spatio-temporal
patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood". Obviously this is not a
solution but just another way of stating the problem.

Hydrocarbon Man, now virtually the sole surviving human subspecies, will certainly be extinct
by the end of this Century, meaning that the very future of Mankind is therefore at stake. This
perhaps explains why oil depletion is such a sensitive subject, which many people, especially
those in government, prefer not to know about. But there are many solutions, especially in
finding effective ways to use less, provided governments take effective action in time. It is
too serious a subject to be left to the whims of an open market built on outdated economic
principles.

Quote for December 2004 from "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish" by Douglas Adams :-

A large spaceship has crashed into Harrods of London, and a large robot has emerged and says,
"take me to your lizard." Ford Prefect explains this to Arthur Dent:-
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see ..."
"You mean it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world,
the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards
rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid
of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty
much assume that the government theyve voted in more or less approximates the government they
want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

In a remarkable way, the effects of marijuana have led to the still unfolding story of the
endocannabinoids. The receptor CB1 seems to be present in all vertebrate species, suggesting
that systems employing the brain's own marijuana have been in existence for about 500 million
years. During that time, endocannabinoids have been adapted to serve numerous, often subtle,
functions. We have learned that they do not affect the development of fear, but the forgetting
of fear; they do not alter the ability to eat, but the desirability of the food, and so on.
Their presence in parts of the brain associated with complex motor behavior, cognition,
learning and memory implies that much remains to be discovered about the uses to which
evolution has put these interesting messengers.

Hiroshima ... Towards the end of World War II the city was utterly devastated by the
first US atomic bomb dropped by the Enola Gay. More than 10 square kilometeres / 4 square miles
were obliterated, with very heavy damage outside that area. Casualties totalled at least
137,000 out of a population of 343,000 : 78,150 were found dead, others died later. By 1995 the
death toll, which included individuals who had died from radiation-related diseases in recent
years, had climbed to 192,000.

The weight of plutonium used in this bomb was 700 grams. Plutonium-238 is available from
the A.E.C. at a cost of about $700 per gram (80 to 89% enriched - Source
http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/plutonium.html.) which would mean that to build
such a bomb today would only cost about $750,000, and, because of the weight involved and
technolgical advances, briefcase nuclear devices probably already exist with more killing power
than either of these first 2 bombs dropped on Japan. Again, we are not being told the
truth.
Quote for April/May 2005 from a reflection from Reverend Peter Coates :-

If there were a war on terror in the Roman province of Judea in the first century, the preacher
from Nazareth must have been high on the most wanted list. Most wanted because he turns upside
down all the values of power politics, and of politicians who might claim that he was on their
side. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey with the acclamations of the people ringing round the
city. He attacked the selfish policies and practices of the ruling rich. He refused to claim
power for himself or his followers and would not use violence to achieve his ends. When his
policies were taken to their logical conclusion (which we read in today's gospel) no one stood
with him. He showed to the whole world that God's way is the way of self denial - not
assertion; accepting suffering - not inflicting it; forgiving - not condemning. He stood alone
because people were and are unable to accept that what this world sees as power and success
are not gifts from a grateful God but emptiness and failure. What God gives to those whom he
loves and who have the courage to accept is the other way - of suffering love; the only way
into his Kingdom of Truth and Justice and Love.

Still, scientists were surprised that a magnetar so far away could alter the ionosphere.

"That it can reach out and tap us on the shoulder like this, reminds us that we really are
linked to the cosmos," said Phil Wilkinson of IPS Australia, that country's space weather
service.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Rob Fender of Southampton University in the UK. "We
have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy,
releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."

Some researchers have speculated that one or more known mass extinctions hundreds of millions
of years ago might have been the result of a similar blast altering Earth's atmosphere. There
is no firm data to support the idea, however. But astronomers say the Sun might have been
closer to other stars in the past.

PRAYER OF SAINT BASIL OF CAESAREA
O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things,
our little brothers and sisters
to whom in common with us
you have given this earth as home.
We recall with regret that in the past
we have acted high-handedly
and cruelly in exercising our domain over them.
Thus, the voice of the earth
which should have risen to you in song
has turned into a groan of travail.
May we realize that all these creatures
also live for themselves and for you,
not for us alone.
They too love the goodness of life,
as we do, and serve you better
in their way than we do in ours.
Amen.

In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give
itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so; entering
into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself; no uncommitted or
unimpaired part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out
of its destiny in creation. On this unconditional immanence the modern temper insists. It is
its courage or despair, in any case its bitter honesty, to take our being-in-the-world
seriously: to view the world as left to itself, its laws as brooking no interference, and the
rigor of our belonging to it as not softened by extramundane providence. The same our myth
postulates for Gods being in the world. Not, however, in the sense of pantheistic immanence; if
the world and God are simply the same, the world at each moment and in each state represents
his fullness, and God can neither lose nor gain. Rather, in order that the world might be, and
be for itself, God renounced his own being, divesting himself of his deity - to receive it
back from the Odyssey of time weighted with the chance harvest of unforeseeable temporal
experience; transfigured or possibly even disfigured by it. In such self-forfeiture of divine
integrity for the sake of unprejudiced becoming, no other foreknowledge can be admitted than
that of possibilities which cosmic being offers in its own terms: to these, God committed his
cause in effacing himself for the world.

And for aeons his cause is safe in the slow hands of cosmic chance and probability - while all
the time we may surmise a patient memory of the gyrations of matter to accumulate into an ever
more expectant accompaniment of eternity to the labors of time - a hesitant emergence of
transcendence from the opaqueness of immanence.

... And then he trembles as the thrust of evolution, carried by its own momentum, passes the
threshold where innocence ceases and an entirely new criterion of success and failure takes
hold of the divine stake. The advent of man means the advent of knowledge and freedom, and with
this supremely double-edged gift the innocence of the mere subject of self-fulfilling life has
given way to the charge of responsibility under the disjunction of good and evil. To the
promise and risk of this agency the divine cause, revealed at last, henceforth finds itself
committed; and its issue trembles in the balance. The image of God, haltingly begun by the
universe, for so long worked upon - and left undecided - in the wide and then narrowing spirals
of pre-human time, passes with this last twist, and with a dramatic quickening of the
movement, into mans precarious trust, to be completed, saved, or spoiled by what he will do to
himself and the world. And in this awesome impact of his deeds on Gods destiny, on the very
complexion of eternal being, lies the immortality of man.

With the appearance of man, transcendence awakened to itself and henceforth accompanies his
doings with the bated breath of suspense, hoping and beckoning, rejoicing and grieving,
approving and frowning - and, I daresay, making itself felt to him even while not intervening
in the dynamics of his worldly scene: for can it not be that by the reflection of its own state
as it wavers with the record of man, the transcendent casts light and shadow over the human
landscape?

Imagine a typical scene in the pub, chatting up girls. I've drunk loads, and bought her quite a
bit too. Now she wants me (oops, I tripped over her guide dog there) and we go back to her
place, but I can't get it up because I'm too poisoned. Or I can get it up, but the feelings and
emotions are all blurred and confused through alcohol poisoning. The climax is a
disappointment since all my feelings are so dulled. What a complete waste of time, money and
resources. And now, there's a sprog 9 months down the line who no-one wants. This is your
lives. Mary Jane will make everything all right. Stop poisoning yourselves and paying
Satanists (govts.) for the privilege to do so.

Such a widespread perceptual failure on the part of the paid, impossible at it seems, has at
least to be briefly considered. Because a fascinating study some years ago from the University
of Southern California concluded that most individuals would indeed refuse to so much as
entertain a fact, no matter how self-evidently true that fact was, if believing it would
directly affect their income. And from rude experience we may extrapolate to include among the
deniers of reality: all those whose self-image and belief system is fanatically welded to the
prevailing social fabric of cheap tricks, fake standards, and prevailing prevarications.

We live in a culture where power precariously supports itself by relying on a tissue of denial
and lies, so closely interwoven that the intellectually lazy never even see it. Just as most
people still don't even notice that the sky above has gone from a heavenly blue to a hell of
anemic whitish-gray. One has to wonder what magnitude of extreme alteration in the natural
environment the average consumer will require, in order to perceive any change in the
surroundings at all. And within the network of hypocrisy, those who do honestly admit to
themselves what is going on carefully examine on which side their bread is buttered- before
bravely declining all comment. When it comes to so-called authorities, the relationship between
abject cowardice, absence of all ethics, and perpetual lying is a very straight line
connecting three shabby dots.

Quote for October 2006-August 2007 from
an article by Lorie Kramer at Carnicom's site

It is the most destructive game of domino stacking ever conceived. The programs that manipulate
the ionosphere are causing holes in the ozone layer and having severe effects on geomagnetic
fields on the planet. The results are seen in the Southern Polar Regions and the change in the
weather. The programs they have initiated to place a band-aid over those ozone holes to try
and "patch" them are increasing global warming, causing drought and deforestation, and making
people incredibly sick and causing deaths. The programs, which are being implemented to enable
advanced weapons systems, are harming the very people they claim they want to defend. They
should change the name to the Department of Offense it would be more appropriate. Despite all
of the horrendous results and continuing destruction, they continue the assaults.

These are all pieces of very destructive puzzles. The populous is being lied to, the ecosystems
are being destroyed, and meanwhile nothing is being done to address the problem. This begs the
question, why?

Have we, as a species, become so perverse that we can no longer connect to the very systems
that provide us with life on this planet? Have we become so consumed with fear and hatred,
greed and the desire for power that we cannot even see where we are destroying ourselves? Have
we become so controlled and dumbed down that we just stand by and watch it all happen without
an effort to stop it? Have we finally made the choice of hate over love at the cost of our
very life on this Earth? Have the holes in our souls become so large that we are willing to
sacrifice our very survival to live in the negativity we have created?

If the unitive and the procreative aspects of sex are not separated, the depopulation of the
West will be prevented, the integrity of marriage will be ensured, and it will halt the
slippery slope of biological madness that separates procreation from sex i.e., cloning.

True freedom and liberation flows from following the laws of God who is the author of nature
and creation. "...[W]hat looks like 'liberation' turns into its opposite and shows its
diabolical visage...all this has already been described with precision in the first pages of
the Bible. The core of the temptation for man and of his fall is contained in programmatic
statement: 'You will be like God'. 'Like God' ...means free of the laws of the Creator, free of
the laws of nature herself, absolute lord of one's own destiny. Man continually desires only
one thing: to be his own creator and his own master. But what awaits us at the end of this road
is certainly not paradise." (Joseph Ratzinger)

Quote for September 2008-September 2009 from an article at
Save the Males

True culture is based on refining our animal instincts in terms of spiritual ideals (like
truth, justice, goodness and beauty.) Modern anti-culture is based on demoralizing and
destroying society by disparaging these ideals. Anti-culture portrays man in purely
naturalistic and material terms. Every sexual impulse and bodily function must be recognized
and indulged. This is considered "courageous" while any demur is considered repressive, prudish
or fascist. In one of the final episodes of "Sex and the City", the audience had to endure
Carrie getting a bikini wax. Thankfully we were spared a full frontal view. This is not
prudishness. Human dignity requires privacy. Female allure requires modesty and mystery. We
have souls, not only bodies. The exaltation of man's animal nature, at the expense of his
spiritual qualities, is a direct consequence of the deification of man. Our anti-culture
assumes that man is a finished product and doesn't need to be transformed by God's Love. A
symptom of making man God is that we mystify and worship human beings. We worship a cult of
great minds, a cult of great beauty, a cult of great wealth and power. Modern "culture"
reflects the final unfolding of a diabolical conspiracy that rejects the Designer's
instructions.

Response from Shefali to another article :-

Many cultures insist on post marital sex only. There is a very spiritual scientific reason.
Auric Imprinting of the wife occurs post coitally and this vibration stays for months after
every few days of contact. The Semen of a man has his entire spiritual evolution and Karma, the
genetic code. If we can contract aids which is an immune condition not even a disease, it
shouldn't be hard to accept what sexual imprints involve. If the girl has pre-marital sex and
marries the same bloke, no problems but if the husband is different, now there is a remnant
vibrational frequency of another man in her aura. If that boyfriend is afflicted by some Karmic
misdeeds and is in anguish, some of that frequency will resonate in the girl's aura and this
will affect her health, her mood and also her husband's mood and so on. Same works in the
reverse too. If you notice many businessmen suddenly having bad luck after they get a fortune,
it is because the first thing they do after making a million is celebrate with an addition of
slutty mistresses who could have been imprinted by drug dealers or convicts a few weeks back.

The girls here are luckier though, they aurically drain the wealth consciousness of the newly
rich fool. in MOST cases the imprints of previous sexual partners act as a hindrance to
attracting a soul mate. especially when the imprints are of negative nature. Also even if u DO
attract a fine partner multiple sexual imprints on the both the sides spoil the connection.

Basically when you sleep with someone you sleep with EVERYONE he/she has slept with. In fact
that is the MAIN reason being a shrink is so lucrative and WHY the Illuminati introduced Casual
Sex especially for women it is catastrophic. A women with too many sexual imprints of too many
partners feels out of focus, and finds herself drifting thru life. it can also cause
personality disorders and mental illness. as for men, they find that there energy being
scattered among so many women makes them feel scattered, out of centre and not at peace.

The first thing to be understood is what ego is. A child is born. A child is born without any
knowledge, any consciousness of his own self. And when a child is born the first thing he
becomes aware of is not himself; the first thing he becomes aware of is the other. It is
natural, because the eyes open outwards, the hands touch others, the ears listen to others, the
tongue tastes food and the nose smells the outside. All these senses open outwards.

That is what birth means. Birth means coming into this world, the world of the outside. So when
a child is born, he is born into this world. He opens his eyes, sees others. 'Other' means the
thou. He becomes aware of the mother first. Then, by and by, he becomes aware of his own body.
That too is the other, that too belongs to the world. He is hungry and he feels the body; his
need is satisfied, he forgets the body.

This is how a child grows. First he becomes aware of you, thou, other, and then by and by, in
contrast to you, thou, he becomes aware of himself.

This awareness is a reflected awareness. He is not aware of who he is. He is simply aware of
the mother and what she thinks about him. If she smiles, if she appreciates the child, if she
says, "You are beautiful," if she hugs and kisses him, the child feels good about himself. Now
an ego is born.

Through appreciation, love, care, he feels he is good, he feels he is valuable, he feels he has
some significance.

A center is born.

But this center is a reflected center. It is not his real being. He does not know who he is; he
simply knows what others think about him. And this is the ego: the reflection, what others
think. If nobody thinks that he is of any use, nobody appreciates him, nobody smiles, then too
an ego is born: an ill ego; sad, rejected, like a wound; feeling inferior, worthless. This too
is the ego. This too is a reflection.

World-class mathematician John von Neuman and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner claim that quantum
theory is actually formally incomplete--and that the least drastic way to make quantum theory
mathematically consistent is to introduce consciousness as the necessary accomplice of every
quantum jump.

Many primitive peoples organized their lives around a doctrine we call "animism", the belief
that every object possesses sentient "insides" like our own. The quantum consciousness
assumption, which amounts to a kind of "quantum animism" likewise asserts that consciousness is
an integral part of the physical world, not an emergent property of special biological or
computational systems. Since everything in the world is on some level a quantum system, this
assumption requires that everything be conscious on that level. If the world is truly quantum
animated, then there is an immense amount of invisible inner experience going on all around us
that is presently inaccessible to humans, because our own inner lives are imprisoned inside a
small quantum system, isolated deep in the meat of an animal brain. We may not need to travel
into outer space to inhabit entirely new worlds. New experiential worlds of inconceivable
richness and variety may already be present "at our fingertips"--worlds made up of strangely
intelligent minds that silently surround and interpenetrate our own modes of awareness.

Half-baked attempts to explain consciousness, such as mind-as-software or mind-as-emergent-
property do not take themselves seriously enough to confront the experimental facts, our most
intimate data base, namely how mind itself feels from the inside. On the other hand, the most
suggestive evidence for a quantum model of mind is that the Heisenberg picture of how quantum
events actually happen in the world is extremely congruent with our own internal experience of
what it's like to be a sentient being. Looking inside, I do not feel like "software" whatever
that might mean, but indeed like a shimmering (wavelike?) center of ambiguous potentia
(possibilities?) around which more solid perceptions and ideas are continually congealing
(quantum jumps?). This rough match of internal feeling with external description could be
utterly deceptive but it at least shows that the quantum model of mind can successfully
confront the introspective evidence in a way that no other mind models even attempt.

At the heart of quantum tantra will be a new kind of measurement that I call "rapprochement" to
distinguish it from the act of measurement in conventional physics. While an ordinary
measurement informs us about a thing's outsides, rapprochement connects the observer to an
object's heretofore hidden insides, allowing him or her to directly experience the inner lives
of quantum systems.

As conventional measurement cannot penetrate to the inside of an object to examine its quantum
potentia because every conventional measurement, no matter how delicate, inevitably triggers a
quantum jump that erases all potentia save one. This new kind of measurement--rapprochement--
on the other hand, connects the mind of the observer directly to the object's potentia without
the intervention of a quantum jump. The full content of the object's inner life is adjoined to
the inner life of the observer and their intermingled potentias mutually enrich each other,
without memorializing or prejudicing one potentia over another.

To achieve rapprochement one needs a way of connecting the mind of the observer to the "mind"
of the object without making records; one needs a so-called "oblivious link" which physically
couples the brain's consciousness to the object in question without initiating a quantum jump.
Since the inner lives of physical objects are almost certainly incomprehensible in human
terms, the first truly usable oblivious links will no doubt be established between two human
quantum centers of consciousness, not between a human consciousness and the insides of some
"inanimate" system. Quantum-intimate brain-matter links with non-human beings will come later,
after we have practiced such linkage with humans.

However, the "telepathy" achieved during rapprochement will feel very different from a mere
exchange of data. The joining of two centers of Heisenbergian potentia via an oblivious link
does not make any records. This new experience of insides-to-insides "essence merge" is a
moment-to-moment impression that is immediately forgotten. Indeed the experience of multivalued
potentia (type-two consciousness) is of a kind that by its very nature must be forgotten,
since only single-valued experiences (type-one consciousness, or quantum jumps) can be recorded
in the brain or anywhere else in the world. One task of the quantum psychologist will be to
determine the relative proportion of type-one and type-two consciousnesses--the proportion,
loosely speaking, of "fact" and "fantasy"--in the minds of various personality types. Although
the experience of rapprochement is soon forgotten, it is not without permanent effect of the
participants. The quantum potentias--and hence the scope of all their future possibilities--of
both partners in the quantum linkup are drastically altered by their intimate essence
exchange.

Quote for June 2011-September 2012 from
From the book "The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge By Carlos Castañeda"

"We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our
lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us
docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act
independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this
time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner!

"This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because
we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as
we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore,
their food is always available to them."

"No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something
monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone."

"Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard
all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me
how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the
stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers
believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil,
our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success
or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who
make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal."

"'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don
Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?"

"'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely
more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the
predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre, stupendous, of course, from the point
of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who
suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which
becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear
of being discovered any minute now."

"I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none
other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to
be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their
mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And
they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear."

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator]
made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one
point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And
then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that
what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a
methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is
no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat."

"There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a
piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."

CONCLUSIONS & FINDINGS OF FACT from U.S. government researchers’ Empirical1 Studies

short or long-term use of cannabis does not have any
adverse effect on mental or physical health;

cannabis is non-addictive, smoked, eaten, or taken as a
beverage; cannabis does not induce physical or psychological
dependence;

"psychosis" is not related to cannabis; pre-existing
schizophrenia can occur in a cannabis using population;

no "amotivational syndrome"; "heavy use of ganja
does not curtail the motivation to work" [original emphasis]. The
contrary is concluded: cannabis has tonic effect, which is
conducive to productive work and mental concentration;

investigating any possiblility of "linkage" as exists
between alcohol, bad behaviour and/or crime: "No evidence
of such causality appeared in the findings." In this context, the
evidence is presented that cannabis has a positive influence producing
beneficial results: i.e…

cannabis reduces and can preclude the use of drugs,
thus mitigating their associated negative effects.